Luca Ferrari - Building Bending Spoons - [Invest Like the Best, EP.446]
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
In this episode, Luca Ferrari, co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, reveals the unique business model behind his company: 25% private equity and 75% technology company. (05:20) Ferrari describes how Bending Spoons acquires digital companies like Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and AOL to own and operate them forever, completely rebuilding their products, infrastructure, monetization, and teams. (06:00)
• Main themes: The conversation explores Bending Spoons' acquisition-driven growth strategy, their talent-first culture, and Ferrari's vision of building a defining European technology company
Speakers
Luca Ferrari
Luca Ferrari is the co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a unique acquisition-driven technology company founded in 2013. Ferrari built the company from €40,000 in initial capital after his previous startup failed, developing it into a billion-euro revenue business that has acquired major digital properties including Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, and AOL. He previously worked at McKinsey to fund his co-founders while they built their first startup, demonstrating his commitment to entrepreneurship from the early days.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum and host of the "Invest Like the Best" podcast. He conducts in-depth conversations with leading investors, entrepreneurs, and business builders, exploring strategies for better investing both time and money.
Key Takeaways
Build Platforms, Not Just Products
Ferrari emphasizes that structural advantages emerge when integrating different businesses under one roof. (19:19) Beyond simple cost synergies like better vendor negotiations, Bending Spoons can fluidly move R&D and marketing resources across businesses to attack fleeting opportunities. Ferrari explains that most companies are "years behind" optimal staffing because hiring and training are slow, but opportunities are fast-moving. By pooling flexible talent, they can quickly capitalize on R&D windows and withdraw resources when opportunities fade, creating both offensive and defensive efficiency advantages.
Talent Density as Ultimate Competitive Advantage
The company's extreme selectivity - hiring 250 people from 800,000 applications (1 in 3,200) - creates a self-reinforcing talent advantage. (23:30) Ferrari argues that while standalone companies like Evernote attract "somewhat average talent," Bending Spoons' growing, diverse model appeals to exceptional people who want variety and rapid skill development. This allows them to attract stronger talent and invest heavily in AI-powered prediction systems to better select within that talent pool - advantages that standalone companies simply cannot achieve.
Zero-to-One vs One-to-N Strategy Selection
After observing dozens of startup teams, Ferrari concluded that going from zero-to-one is largely luck-dependent, with little correlation between talent/effort and success. (17:05) However, functional skills like software engineering, design, and marketing improve predictably with effort and discipline. This insight led to Bending Spoons' acquisition model: buy businesses where someone else got lucky or succeeded at zero-to-one, then apply superior functional execution to scale them. This strategy bets on controllable skill development rather than random market timing.
Consensus is Overrated and Dangerous
Ferrari learned that seeking consensus while trying to achieve something exceptional will doom you to failure. (26:10) Despite naturally enjoying consensus and struggling with friction, he discovered that having clear intellectual conviction and accepting disagreement - even "pissing some people off" - is a superpower. He argues management teams worry too much about team members disagreeing with or criticizing them, when they should be uncompromising if they believe they have the right path forward after listening to input with intellectual honesty.
Fixed Compensation Over Variable Incentives
Contrary to typical startup practice, Bending Spoons pays everyone fixed salaries with no variable pay, stock grants, or KPI-based bonuses. (60:00) Ferrari believes this approach maximizes alignment by hiring high-integrity people with professional pride, then treating them with utmost respect. He argues that financial incentives are costly to administer, inevitably create perverse incentives due to imperfect design, and make relationships more transactional, hindering genuine problem-solving collaboration focused on collective success.
Statistics & Facts
- Bending Spoons receives approximately 800,000 unique job applications per year and hires only 250 people, creating a selection ratio of roughly 1 in 3,200. (22:59) This extreme selectivity enables the company to maintain exceptional talent density as a competitive advantage.
- The company has maintained 75% annual revenue and EBITDA growth over the past four years, even at a scale of approximately €1.3 billion in revenue for 2024. (29:34) Ferrari notes this compounding rate has been consistent despite reaching substantial scale.
- AOL is the fifth most used email inbox in the Western world, despite being perceived as a legacy product. (51:29) This statistic illustrates Ferrari's point about finding valuable businesses that others dismiss, with AOL serving tens of millions of loyal users.
